Firefox vs IE
Within the design community there is a large push for web standards and compliant browsers. Web standards is a coding methodology that requires stricter syntax and encourages separating content from structure and behavior, which leads to better design, usability, re-usability, modularisation, and other design benefits. This has sparked a debate about which browsers support Web Standards compliant sites.
Internet explorer owned the browser market until 2004 when FireFox began making a serious run as standards compliant browser, where as IE has its own interpretations of standards issues. The largest headache for designers is the box model. IE interprets the margins, padding, and borders one way, while standards compliant browsers interpret those items differently.
So the designer must be aware of the differences when designing a site which relies on several boxes or columns.
The design community has tried to influence the user market to switch to FireFox. It only makes sense that designers and web surfers would want standards based sites which perform as expected. Yet my research of the 8 sites I manage shows that IE is still the dominant browser used and is regaining market share over the past few months. Visitors to these sites use IE 80% of the time and FireFox about 15%. My photography site which would tend to attract more designers than average Joe’s shows only 20% usage of FireFox.
So what is a designer to do? Do we build for 20% or less of our visitors and try to convert the rest of the visitors through miniature ads for FireFox? I’m thinking no. The market will decide in the long run if standards compliance is a value or not, and if the alternative browsers are easier to use. Outside of the design community very few people care which browser is installed or what features it may have/lack.
As for me, I will continue to develop and test for the IE browser, and make changes that are also supported by FireFox which do not change the overall effect in IE. Who knows, perhaps Microsoft will wake up and convert their browsers to standards compliance and once again make the argument about ease of use or best marketing campaign.
PS - This issue is made less relevant when you realize the how few the number of designers and site creation tools manufacturers are utilizing standards. Not saying the few are not right, but they only speak for a small segment of site development. Standards pushers tend to be intolerant of use of non-standards technologies loved by the rest of the development world. The argument of which methods are better is similar to asking photographers which cameras are better, but in the end it is all just tools and methods we use to achieve some end.